Audit Exposes Billions of Missing Prayers, More Gods May Be Required (humor)

Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conducted an exhaustive audit into the practices of the Heavenly Office of Divine Intervention in response to numerous complaints of unanswered prayers regarding health issues, among many others. On Friday, the results of the audit were released to the public, exposing a massive overburden within the HODI, causing billions of prayer requests to be forgotten or more often, to completely go missing.

The Heavenly Office of Divine Intervention, a division of the Government of the Republic of Heaven, is the agency responsible for granting the requests of humans by suspending the laws of the universe in order to achieve anything from curing people of diseases to saving people from house fires, though they mostly help sports teams win important games. But the rate and speed of the agency's response to prayers has declined in the last few thousand years, causing anger among many.

The Holy Ghost, Assistant Secretary of the HODI, says that the problem has been around for a long time.

"You know, ten thousand years ago, the people had enough faith for multiple gods. Things were great back then. We were able to provide more services and the people were overall happy with our performance. But then, they cut us down to just one god. And to make things worse, the people kept multiplying so we now have a situation in which one god trying to do ten times the work that hundreds of gods did before. It's just insane to think that we can keep up with that."

His response echoes what many analysts and neo-pagans have said for a long time- one god just isn't enough. Upon further inspection, this concern is further supported by the fact that the complaints appear to have begun about three thousand years ago, coinciding with the switch from many gods to just one.

When asked what can be done about the situation, Asst. Secretary Ghost had a less than optimistic response.

"Well, only two things can happen here. Neither is going to make the public happy. The first thing is that we can go back to our previous staff size, which would require a budget increase in an already dismal economy. The second is that the office will have to close and people will have to rely on their own medicine and their own technology to provide for the things that we currently provide for."

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services informed us that they are yet unsure what will be the next step but they assure us that something will be done to relieve the situation and to ensure that the HODI can operate efficiently and effectively.